At 5:01 a.m., EST, today, the 20th of March in the year 2025, all hemispheres on our planet experienced one of the two annual equinoxes. One would hope today’s would involve an instant of harmony and balance but, … not so.
Genocide, murder, ethnic cleansing and hypocrisy reign thanks to the monsters who inhabit Israel and to their enablers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France as well as among the diverse Middle Eastern dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, etc.
It is instead an instant during a multiyear period when evil reigns and when, as Leo Durocher once noted, nice guys finish last, although, among world leaders, nice guys are a rare breed, as rare as are decent men and women.
As was the case when the Nazis ruled in Germany, most decent people, at least in North America and Europe, are deluded. They’re like ostriches with their heads in the sand or like the three simians who believe that as long as they can avoid hearing, seeing, or talking about the evil in which they’re immersed, they’re safe.
Those in the Global South, more sensitized by their experience with the colonialist North, look on enraged and ashamed but impotent as the phrase “never again” morphs into “as usual”.
Sad thoughts on a lonely planet spinning along in a multiverse where justice and equity are irrelevant. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
He’d thrown caution to the wind, gambling again against the future and the past, willingly offering them up in exchange for the possible enchantment that appeared to be within his grasp, fleeting though it might be, hoping that one single triumph would make everything else, all the past failures, irrelevant.
It was not a unique situation.
In the past, similar circumstances had failed to fulfill his expectations. But they’d always extracted the full price he’d been willing to pay. He’d been left emotionally, physically and materially drained but, he’d just start anew, never learning and hoping that he never would.
His past infatuations had rarely matured into even meaningful relationships and certainly not into “the” special relationship he’d always optimistically intuited. Yet “rarely” had always seemed, at least momentarily, enough. And despite his past failures, not that many but not that few, he remained optimistic. After all, the unique experience he hoped for could only really occur, in its most profound sense, once. And only one person out of all the people who had ever been born or would ever be born could fulfill it. The person who, as to him, would prove to be the single source of complete resonance: amorous, intellectual, spiritual and physical, melding their individual vibrancies into a single perfect wave, one between and among them and no one else.
Or so he understood.
Others wondered what sort of wave might coalesce through the joinder of more than just two, perhaps even many vibrancies, and the more spiritual aspired to join the ultimate wave that might be formed joining us all.
The possibility of artificial intelligence encapsulated in the verisimilitude of human form might soon complicate the premises involved.
But, as to him, at that moment, at that instant, he wondered what she, the latest catalyst for his obsession, was thinking. Or of what, perhaps, she was dreaming. Which raised the issue of which was the real world, the waking or the dreaming. And then, whether the objects in a dream, the beings who seemed to populate it, had their own realities, their own dreams. And finally, the eternal speculation as to whether we might not all just be objects in the perpetual dream of the most primordial of all denizens of the vegetable kingdom, as so many plants and flowers and shrubs and trees, especially giant redwoods, seem to hope. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Biggus Dickus, a character eventually revealed (albeit tangentially) in Monty Python’s documentary on the Life of Brian (which dealt with purported events during the first century of the Common Era), may or may not have involved a parody of the infamous Roman Casanova-wanna-be, Primus Phalux Maximus Quintus (who may or may not have actually existed), and who if he did exist (improbable but one never knows), but for temporal improbabilities, may or may not have been the secret hidden triplet of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the third member of which was the audaciously beautiful, sensuous and libidinous Clodia Metelli, sometimes known as Quadrantaria, of whom the Roman eroticist poet Gaius Valerius Catullus longingly wrote dramatically ambivalent vignettes comprised in equal parts of love, despair and deprecation. At least that might have been the lead story in the media in the late Roman Republic, circa sixty years before the Common Era, had its journalistic ethics born a resemblance to that of today’s maliciously creative corporate media, which, come to think of it, it may well have, both having prioritized creative writing. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
What if words are in fact components of sentient collective streams that actually control us; that use our organic components as tools for their own internecine purposes?
What if words are, in fact, sentient memes and memeplexes that ride us the way we are led to believe by them that we use animals and tools for what we erroneously perceive to be our own purposes.
Mightn’t that explain why, in the end as in the beginning, our conduct tends towards incoherence, at least from our own reactive rather than volitional perceptions?
Mightn’t the word, “internecine” say it all, or at least, a great deal?
What if rather than “being because we think” we just “think we are”?
What would a mimetically sentient “god of the words” be like, after all, purportedly, “in the beginning was the Word”? _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
I’ve been listening to the beautiful Scottish Anthem, Highland Cathedral lately. Almost compulsively so. I’m very supportive of the rights of subjugated peoples, rights to the independence purportedly guaranteed as a result of the first war to end all wars, the one we now know, after its abject failure as World War I and, to me, the Scotts are an enigma. Brutally subjugated by the English, they morphed into English tools for the subjugation of others including the attempted subjugations of residents of thirteen of England’s North American colonists, whole peoples throughout the world including the Indian subcontinent, Asia and Africa. As an aside, I wonder why India is a subcontinent while Europe is a continent when, in reality, both are parts of Asia.
Still, many Scotts are awakening and discarding the hypocrisy inherent in their subjugation. Bagpipe hymns like Highland Cathedral and Scotland the Brave bring to mind the aspiration for freedom, independence and self-expression of legendary Scottish folk heroes like Robert the Bruce, John Balliol, David II and even he who was referred to as Bonny Prince Charley, the original Charles III. Today, of course, they would be joined by numerous Palestinian martyrs.
Perhaps many of today’s Scotts are being shamed by the courage of the Palestinian people in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing and the theft of their country by European invaders. Scottish independence. Now wouldn’t that be something. And perhaps a United Ireland. And, maybe even a free Wales. And, of course, a Free Palestine.
Highland Cathedral, perhaps an anthem for the subjugated everywhere.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
It’s Christmas Eve in the year 2024, an eventful year although not for reasons we will be proud to remember, especially in the Middle East. But it’s still that special season that has been honored wherever men have roamed since we became sentient and noticed the seeming miracle of the twin solstices, the one in the North, with the longest night, and the one in the South with the longest day. The equator is currently not far from where I live in a wonderful city high in the Central range of the Colombian Andes. Here, spring reigns eternal. It’s a city at the southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere. I guess that at the equator solstices and equinoxes coincide. I have often wondered what it would be like to live in a home that straddles the equatorial line, one concurrently both real and imaginary. It must be a magical place. But, at any rate, for me, solstices as well as equinoxes have always seemed days for introspection and this year I’ve reflected on my friend Bobby, and on the special parochial school in Hollis, Queens, in New York City from which I graduated in late June of 1960, St. Gerard de Majella (we just called it St. Gerard’s).
So, about Bobby.
I can’t recall his last name. He’s not in the picture above, he didn’t graduate with me from St. Gerard’s. He lived with his family over a candy store on Hillside Avenue in Queens Village, New York, between 215th and 216th streets I think. I recall sharing “chocolate egg creams” there. I lived in the Abbot Arms apartment complex across the street (at least I think that’s what it was called). We were briefly “best” friends during the 1960-1961 academic year, a very difficult year for me and not just because hormones had kicked into high gear. That was the year Bill Mazeroski broke Mickey Mantle’s heart, … and mine. Bobby was Italian and his family was very kind, very warm; very full of joy. I loved some of the food his wonderful mom made for us but not all of it, not the bull’s balls, … yuck!!! But I ate them just the same.
Bobby was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He helped me through a rough time. As had happened all too often, I’d switched schools in the middle of the 1960-61 academic year, having been transferred over my protests by my parents from Jamaica High School, which I really liked and where many of my friends from St. Gerard’s had gone, to Martin Van Buren, a relatively new school where I knew no one. After almost yearly changes in schools, this was one too many and I finally rebelled. I informally refused to accept the transfer, instead, riding the New York City subways all day until I was finally caught. I remember that I’d planned to emancipate myself by becoming a comic book artist and had sent DC Comics an idea for a new super hero I’d drawn, “Ultraman” I think I called him. Their rejection letter was polite: “they had enough artists and did not generally hire fourteen year olds”.
I remember that chief among the delights of Jamaica High were two girls, Karen Luckhart (I think that was her last name but I’ve probably misspelled it) and Mary Bakanskas (ditto on the spelling), and I also had a host of other good friends. One’s name was Tommy Scott, a classmate from St. Gerard’s; we used to hang out together before classes started. There was also a very pretty sophomore named Cindy who sometimes deigned to join us freshmen at our early morning gatherings. I remember that she smoked and seemed very mature and somewhat wise. Smoking created impressions like that back then. Now, not so much. And then there was a sort of friend, Johnny Eckelstein, a sort of rival. He was on Jamaica High’s track team.
I don’t remember anyone from my short stay at Van Buren.
At the end of that academic year I was off to the Eastern Military Academy in Cold Spring Hills, New York, overlooking Cold Spring Harbor, an old whaling port. It was my choice and a wise one. Eastern provided me with an Island of stability as my family fell apart. My mother and stepfather separated then divorced in 1962 and my younger siblings, my sister Marina and my brother Teddy were also sent to boarding schools, Marina to Sag Harbor and Teddy to St. Basil’s in upstate New York. Eastern was the first school in my life where I remained for more than two years. I graduated from Eastern in 1964 and returned to teach there for a decade after college at the Citadel.
I never saw or heard from Bobby after I left for Eastern but I never forgot him either.
I frequently wonder what happened to all of those people with whom I shared a bit of friendship in that strange year. I wish there was some way to reconnect but until recently, not even Facebook has helped. I’ve tried. I especially tried with respect to those who graduated with me from St. Gerard’s in June of 1960. Most especially with respect to one with whom I may never have shared a single word. Patricia Maher was her name and this time I´ve got the spelling right. I’ve posted on a Facebook page for St. Gerard’s (which ceased operations in 2008 but whose chapel still survives) but have yet to receive any responses. I’ve heard that former governor Mario Cuomo also went there. He was one of my law school professors, the one I most admired although his sons have sullied his name. I think of St. Gerard’s every time I watch Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in the Bells of St. Mary’s (which I try to do every Christmas).
I recall the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s at St. Gerard’s and the special message that the Virgin of Fatima had supposedly delivered to a young girl in Portugal, Lucia dos Santos was her name then. She’d turned the message over, sealed, to the Vatican, and Pope John XXIII was supposed to finally unseal it as 1959 turned to 1960. I recall the rumor that when he’ read it, he’d passed out and that the message was so troubling that after we’d waited for half a century to hear it (well, not us specifically, we’d only waited thirteen years), we’d just have to keep on waiting.
I remember St. Gerard’s and love it more every year and wonder what ever happened to my classmates, hoping that they’ve all enjoyed happy and productive lives. But Bobby, I remember him best. I hope he’s thriving and that he’s had a great life.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
[1] To the tune of Joan Baez singing “There but for Fortune” and Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “The Seven O’clock News/Silent Night”.
An introspection dedicated to Billy, Alex and Edward, to Marina and Teddy, to my mother, Rosario who’s been gone now for a third of a century, and to her sisters Carola (who joined her a while ago) and Livia who is blessedly still here. To long gone “Pop” who left us in 1972 and to our matriarch, Juanita, who after having lived a bit more than a century, determined, on her own, that it was time to go. And, of course, to Natalia.
Christmas has often seemed nostalgically melancholy to me. It involves an anniversary, each anniversary different, sometimes very different. My happiest were when I was surrounded by family, first as a young child with my younger sister Marina, then with Marina and my little brother Teddy and with my mother and my stepfather Leon. Then, eventually, much later, as a parent with a wife and one, then two, and finally three sons.
My first recollection is when Marina and I were very little. My mother and father had separated and he was probably with his family in Barinas, Venezuela while my mother had started her adventure in the United States. We were left in my grandmother Juanita’s care, along with my wonderful aunts, Livia and Carola. My earliest Christmas memory involves my grandmother’s annual Christmas event for the poorest children in the City of Manizales in Colombia. My grandmother owned a hotel, the Hotel Roma, which included a wonderful restaurant with a large dining room and, for Christmas, she’d pile the dining room with a small mountain of gifts which, on that occasion, I, in representation of baby Jesus (I was three at the time) was charged with distributing to the many dozens of very poor young children present. It should have been a beautiful event except that I misbehaved. I kept a toy I liked for myself and when my grandmother found out, my baby Jesus role was over forever. She said I’d behaved more like baby Satan. My transgression that evening, even as young as I was, impacted me profoundly and since that time I have always tried my best to be kind to those less advantaged than I.
My next set of memories were after I and Marina had joined my mother in the United States and we had formed a new family with my stepfather Leon (who I always called “Pop” at his suggestion). We didn’t have very much back then but we didn’t know we were poor and Christmas was full of presents, or so it seemed. For me, usually toy guns, toy guns that became more and more realistic (that not being politically incorrect back then) and, on two occasions, electric trains. I can’t recall what presents Marina and Teddy received except on one occasion, Christmas of 1956, an eventful year. We’d been living idyllically for over a year in Charlotte, for once in a house rather than in an apartment, and even had a housekeeper but, in a flash, it was all gone and we were headed back to Miami Beach, to a tiny apartment again, and worse, my stepfather was not with us having been injured in a serious car accident. We had virtually nothing except a bit of charity from my stepfather’s sister, my aunt Mary, and my mother was understandably a wreck so that a good deal of family “management” had devolved on eleven year old me, and Christmas was around the corner. I’d arranged for small presents for Marina and Teddy so that they’d continue to believe in Santa, comic books for Marina as I recall, and perhaps a football for Teddy (which I too could use) but, on Christmas Eve, as twilight fell, in walked Pop, his arms loaded with gifts. The relief I felt was intense and the happiness awesome. The best present ever. We had each other. …. Until we didn’t. Not quite. Not in the same way. Five years later, in 1961 our family abruptly fragmented as so many, indeed most, do now. As the one I was to lead in the future many decades later was to do as well. I recall our last Christmas all together, it was in New York, in Queens Village, and it had snowed, and I recall that Marina, Teddy and I along with other children made snow angels in the yard of the small apartment complex where we then lived on Hillside Boulevard between 215th and 216th streets. Abbot Arms it was called, as I recall.
After that I was in a military boarding school, the Eastern Military Academy, and then in college at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and I usually spent Christmases with friends at their homes. Pleasant times, even wonderful times, but not the same. And after college, I returned to the military academy from which I’d graduated, the one that had become home to me and where I spent almost a decade as a teacher and administrator. The Eastern Military Academy was a magical place, indeed, it was a real castle (Oheka Castle nowadays), and Christmases were interesting, almost always white. All the students were gone and the resident faculty members gathered to share the season in front of roaring fires with special egg nog and shared meals. Christmas then was communal, shared with special people. With Susan Metz with whom I lived at the time and with the literary scholar, Roger Hamilton, and with the LaForges and the Coffeens, and especially with the wonderful Greene family, David, the patriarch and his wonderful wife Jane, and their children: Robert (who was to become my best friend) and Laurie who passed away much too young. They were family but, of course, a very different sort of family.
My second “real” family, the one I founded as an adult, also shared what to me seemed beautiful winter holidays and that was as true when we could afford anything any of us wanted as it was when, occasionally, very briefly, we had practically nothing. Billy, Alex and Edward, my sons, always made Christmas very special, no matter what. Indeed, my most beautiful memory involves a time when, after a country hotel and restaurant we’d bought in Laurel Hills, North Carolina (the Echo Mountain Inn) had failed and we’d lost almost everything, we were spending Christmas morning in the Florida home of George and Agnes Chamberlin, the wonderful parents of a childhood friend, and presents were being opened. One came packed in a series of boxes to the utter delight of my second son, Alex (then about three years old). Alex was very excited as every present was opened (even though most were not for him) and, when the gag box within a box within a box package was being opened, he kept exclaiming, “a box; a box”. I also very fondly recall when some years later, at a time when our fortunes had vastly improved, my sons’ mother Cyndi and I climbed the roof of our large comfortable home to plant replica reindeer tracks so that my three sons would continue to believe in St. Nicholas, or at least to remain open-minded on the subject. Open mindedness reinforced by their mother’s refrain of “if you don’t believe you won’t receive”. A persuasive argument. I also recall the time some years later when I combed the country looking for a just released video game console my sons were desperate to receive (am Xbox as I recall), one which a business partner in upstate New York finally located for me. And I recall how pleased I was with myself for having been able to find it, the best present of all for me having been being able to please my sons.
When Christmases were happy times, one of the things that most impacted me, in addition to being extremely grateful for my family, was the spirit of decency and goodwill that seemed to permeate the season. The hope for peace and justice and for a better world that seemed a legacy from the Nazarene who many called “the Prince of Peace” (but in whose name, incongruously, his most devoted followers caused so much killing and mayhem and misery). The latter reality became more obvious to me as I matured intellectually and became a more devoted historian and academic; when I eventually began to pierce the veils of delusion woven around us all and Christmas lost much of its allure, its tidings of hope receding and becoming instead, an opportunity for contrasting the stark realities in which we lived. Realities in which a tiny few had more than they could ever consume. Realities in which a seeming majority managed to get by somehow. But a reality in which many, way too many, suffered terribly, both materially and spiritually. A reality where far too many found the holiday season the saddest and most despairing time of the year. To a greater and greater extent, the latter’s despair touched me, every year a bit more. It touched me as our world spiraled more and more out of quilter, it touched me more and more as justice and equity were revealed as empty promises, mere delusive illusions, and it touched me more and more as I came to realize that superficial things that seem to bring us pleasure, things like television programs and concerts and movies and sports were merely temporary distractions used to maintain us tightly under control. In that regard I remember the famous version of “Silent Night” by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released in 1966 (the 7:00 News and Silent Night medley) at the height of the military misadventure then known as the Vietnam War, a war that claimed many of those I most loved and admired. People like my Citadel classmates Woody Woodhouse and Ron Ashe and John Bradman and too many others to name.
Still, even then, Christmas had its enchantment. I recall Christmas during 1976 while I was attending the graduate division of the New York University’s School of Law to earn a postgraduate degree in international legal studies. I recall how on the day before Christmas Eve that year I drove with my wonderful friend, Robert Greene, through the neighborhood in lower Manhattan adjoining the Williamsburg Bridge which I traversed every weekday as I travelled to classes in Washington Square Park, and how from my car window we passed out bottles of Lowenbrau dark beer to the homeless men and women who congregated on our route, people who we were too poor to help on normal occasions, and I recall how pleased we were with our apparent beneficence, something which certainly did more for us than it did for the recipients of our gifts. And then I recall that, after my classes that evening, we were off, back to our Long Island home at the military academy where we both taught, off to share tidings of comfort and joy, a time of awakening for both of us but shielded from the dark by families and friends sharing memories that would keep us warm for years to come. That keep me warm today.
The 1970’s were a strange time, a time full of hope when we who’d come of age in the sixties thought we could change the world only to have it change us during the 1980’s. The 1980’s when we reverted to form, our idealistic illusions fading more and more each year as we had our own families and I had my own sons. Providing for them became the greater good and the world’s ills, and the ills of many around us became less clear, less important, at least to us. That digression lasted through the turn of the millennium, a privileged time for many of us in many senses, but a worse and worse time for most of the world.
I remember the last Christmas I spent as part of a family with my sons and their mother Cyndi, still my wife then. It was in 2006. By 2007 our family had imploded and exploded and fragmented and the last traces of merry Christmases had faded until their echoes had become dissonant and I found myself among the masses of those for whom the holidays were the saddest part of the year rather than the happiest. Not that I was terribly off, just that by 2008 I was in a different country, back in Colombia where I’d been born, in a different continent, separated from the family I had once led and which I missed very much. And that in that loneliness, although I was not alone, I came closer and closer to understanding the darker side of our world, a darker side about which I, then a college professor, taught. And I became very personally impacted by the seeming futility of seeking that world that the promises attributed to the ancient Nazarene proclaimed were our due and our responsibility. And I somehow blamed him for having failed us when the reverse was much more true.
Those darker times have now largely passed, at least personally. Since 2019 I’ve found comfort with my current wife, Natalia, a woman who, as a noncustodial parent, has also endured the loss of intimacy with her children. Because of shared negative experiences we’re able to comfort each other and to share a new version of joy, although one tinged with maturity and reality. One grounded in spirituality and civic activism. One which resonates with the echoes of the homeless and the poor and with their suffering, suffering of which Joan Baez once sang “there but for fortune go you or I”. So now, this season is neither merry nor full of despair but, at least for my wife and for me, it has evolved into a time for reflection and introspection, and for recalling memories of other days, and for watching old Christmas classics like “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Going My Way” where Bing Crosby, long gone, still creates the illusion of Christmas as a magical time, a time when anything is possible and, at any rate, when things seemingly turned out well. It has evolved into a time for my own version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carroll”; a time where I welcome the spirits of Christmases past to share a cup of cheer, albeit nostalgically and melancholically as I recall happy times now receded into fond memories.
Soo, it’s that season again, but this year, this terrible year when genocide has become acceptable in Nazareth and Bethlehem and the other areas where the Nazarene whose birth we celebrate once trod, it’s a time for even more reflection and introspection than usual, and for treasuring the people, not the things, that leave us with at least a trace of hope that the Christmas dreams of our youth will someday be reflected in better, more just and kinder realities. Times when that gentle Nazarene, were he among us, whether or not he was or is divine, would find us having been worth his sacrifice. And with that image in my heart, an ironic refrain seems to fill the end of a movie as a portly old man dressed in red and white, in extremely good humor, shouts: “and a merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night”. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Today marks this year’s Winter Solstice, Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Here in Manizales high in the Central range of the beautiful Colombian Andes, we are on the Southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere. The Winter Solstice was one of the earlier dates for Christmas prior to Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar changes in 1582 more than a millennia after the holiday had been moved to December 25 by the Roman Christian Church in order to coincide with the birth of the Persian divinity, Mithras, coincidentally born of a virgin and died crucified.
A day for balanced reflection, for endings and new beginnings.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Of all the beliefs attributed to Yešu the Nazarene, none alienated him more from mainstream Judaism and indeed, from his Roman masters than did his profound belief in equity, equality and justice, beliefs that in the economic sphere are, given the attitudes of his modern followers, especially in the United States, profoundly ironic and indeed, oxymoronic. And they were not just beliefs but practices, both during his life among his apostles and, after his demise, in the Jerusalem community briefly led by his brother James until the movement was corrupted and perverted into the modern concepts collectively referred to as “Christianity” by Saul of Tarsus, a man who, according to Jewish lore, lore reflected in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds but also in the series of alternative gospels known under the collective name of the Toledot Yeshu, was a Jewish mole in the Nazarene movement whose mission it was to separate followers of Yešu from mainstream Judaism, something in which Saul, better known to “Christians” as “Paul”, was eminently successful.
Most people in the United States and Europe who consistently use the term “communism” have no idea what it entails, just as they have no idea what “socialism” or “fascism” entail, believing only that they are evil totalitarian political and economic philosophies. That they are merely pejoratives to be indiscriminately hurled against those that they oppose, regardless of how incoherent the context. Their ignorance is not their fault, it has been carefully cultivated by both Jewish leaders and the leaders of “Christianity”, the movement established by Saul of Tarsus which captured and distorted the movement founded by Yešu, the Nazarene. “Communism” is the direct reflection of Yešu’s teachings to the effect that we should share what we have with those less fortunate and that no one should accumulate more than is needed, especially if doing so deprives others of necessities. Needles and camels come to mind. That is also the premise of socialism. Neither communism nor socialism have anything to do with totalitarianism, or with authoritarianism, or with dictatorship, or with tyranny although, as in the case of capitalism, neoliberalism, globalism, etc., those negative antilibertarian control features have been combined with economic doctrines in order to maintain elites in power. And Yešu’s economic philosophies had nothing to do with maintaining elites in power. Rather they urged leveling of the playing field and equality and equity for all, with justice tempered by mercy. Remember, he preferred the company of sinners to that of hypocrites.
Of course, Yešu’s philosophies were quickly overwhelmed and subsumed by those of Saul of Tarsus, and eventually, by those of numerous Catholic Popes and then, by the philosophies incoherently evolved by followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin in Yešu’s name, e.g., the Protestant ethic and capitalism. How Yešu must hate that, especially if he is the being who his purported followers believe him to be. How Yešu must despise neoliberalism and globalism and neoconservatism. How disappointed he must be that his teachings have, for the most part, been so completely perverted. How shocked he must be as his purported followers support genocide, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid and eschew tolerance.
Yešu, ironically given modern perceptions, was a dedicated communist. I am not a believer in the divinity of Yešu but I profoundly respect and admire what he tried to teach us and regret that as in the song “Vincent” written by Don McLean as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh, “…. They would not listen, they’re not listening still; perhaps they never will”.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 